...it's like TV Tropes, but LINKED DATA!
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There's a phrase that's important to the plot or arc (possibly Arc Words). There will come a time the characters encounter the phrase in a foreign language. The foreign phrase will always be translated precisely to the important phrase, even though linguistic quirks would make this unlikely. It even works with songs, when the translation rhymes. However, in TV land, languages have exact 1:1 word/syntax relationships and the translation, even if done by a third party who has never heard the Arc Words, will always be exact. An ancient inscription will always be rendered in complex long words with nuanced meanings, despite the fact that on-the-spot translation typically sounds more like a two year old trying to put together a sentence. It gets even more amazing when ancient spells and prophecies rhyme or are puns in English. For proof that this doesn't work at all, go to Google Translate and translate a sentence multiple times across many languages. exampleThis is the first sentence of "Oliver Twist" run through around twenty layers of Google Translate: "I think the small and large discrimination, to avoid a variety of obvious reasons, most of the old city အယောင်ဆောင်ပြီး sounds like the name of the joint work will be assigned a particular city and other public buildings. born this change. In the case of the company or sand, and you can make eopseupnidayi steps back injury accurate reading. Regardless to make unprecedented name to a header and death." The original is "Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns, great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is prefixed to the head of this chapter." An exception occasionally pops up when the form of a word in another language (usually with declensions, like Latin) reveals information such as number or gender that would require additional words in English, allowing the translation to be more precise than one would expect. See Either "World Domination", or Something About Bananas for the most common subversion, and Incidental Multilingual Wordplay for a few real life examples. |
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A plot point in Empire from the Ashes rests on the language of the Fourth Imperium of Man having terms equivalent in nuance to the English terms 'Imperium' and 'Empire'. Note that the Fourth Imperium predates civilization on Earth by millennia. To be fair, the book at least is nice to specify that the language of the Fourth Imperium had equivalent terms, rather than just acting as if the English translation was proof enough. | |
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Played with in Green Lantern Annual #9 (2000), where an archeologist translates a Sumerian inscription, which is actually the Green Lantern oath, which does rhyme in English (which itself raises questions), but she doesn't know that, so her translation doesn't. | |
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Averted in Seven Stars, where a plot point involves a secret prophecy made by Nostradamus (and thus originally in French). It refers to an event occurring at a particular time in the "Maison Blanche", which translates as "white house". But nobody's sure whether that means a white house, or something called "white house" in English, or something with a name in some other language that can also be translated as "white house". Edwin sends associates to cover every possibility they can think of, including the White House in Washington DC and Casablanca in Morocco. It turns out to be referring to Casablanca — not the real one in Africa, but the soundstage where Warner Brothers have recreated the town for a new Humphrey Bogart movie. | |
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Used twice in Angel: The so-called Shanshu Prophecy says that the vampire with a soul will "shanshu" as a reward if he makes it through his trials. Wesley struggles with finding a translation for this word, first going for "die", but finally discovering that the word means both to die and to live, explaining that the original authors of the text thought of life as cyclical and thus equated the two concepts. He realizes this means he will "live until he dies", or in other words, become human again.. Spoofed in an episode where Lorne states that a group of demons "...either are going to discuss it with the prince, or go eat a cheesemonkey". |
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The treasure map in The Goonies is in Spanish, but when translated into English, it becomes rhyming verse. No one even stops to consider how unusual this is. | |
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Spoofed in a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode where the Simpsons are kidnapped by Kang and Kodos and treated to a luxurious feast, making Lisa suspicious. She finds a heavy tome titled 'How to Cook Humans' and confronts the aliens about it. Kang shows that the full title is obscured by some 'space dust': it's 'How to Cook For Humans.' Lisa isn't convinced and removes some more lingering space dust on the cover: it's 'How to Cook Forty Humans'. Kang finally reveals the full title: 'How to Cook for Forty Humans'. The aliens are dismayed at humanity's suspicious nature and return them to Earth, saying they've forfeited the paradise the aliens were offering them. The episode also jokes that the reason the Aliens speak English is that by an amazing coincidence, English and Rigelian are identical. | |
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In Titanic (1997), it's mentioned the necklace is called "The Heart of the Ocean." Later when Cal presents the necklace to Rose, he calls it "Le CÅ“ur de la Mer," which both characters simultaneously translate as "The Heart of the Ocean." However, one would usually translate mer as "sea." Of course, if it's a well-known necklace it probably has an official translated name in English, which both characters probably already know. (Compare how everyone "knows" that the "real" translation of the Chinese "Honglou Meng" is "Dream of the Red Chamber" rather than "Red Room Dreams" or "Scarlet Quarters Reverie".) | |
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A poem in the twelfth Deverry book includes a note that it rhymes in Deverrian, but not English. | |
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Subverted in The Usual Suspects: a Hungarian who encountered Keyser Soze is translated by an American interpreter as saying that they picked up a pasas, or "package." In reality, pasas is actually Hungarian slang for "guy," which no one realizes until much later on, giving Verbal enough time to mislead the interrogator until his bail is posted. The fact that the translator's first language is English, and less likely to know slang in another language, makes this scene more realistic. | |
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Frequently used in The Twilight Zone: Notably in the episode "To Serve Man", which manages to simultaneously subvert this trope and provide one of the most ridiculous examples of it. Translators translate the name of the aliens' book as "To Serve Man" but don't realize until later that the "serve" in this case means to serve as food. However, the entire premise of this misunderstanding of the translation is patently ridiculous, as it asks the viewer to seriously believe that the exact same pun exists in two completely unrelated languages. The original Damon Knight short story that the episode was adapted from does attempt to get around this by saying that English and Kanamit share certain linguistic quirks and double meanings. (It also depicts the translation as less like codebreaking than the TZ episode; the people in the story use a Kanamit-English phrasebook as a starting point for the translation.) Spoofed in a Simpsons Treehouse of Horror episode where the Simpsons are kidnapped by Kang and Kodos and treated to a luxurious feast, making Lisa suspicious. She finds a heavy tome titled 'How to Cook Humans' and confronts the aliens about it. Kang shows that the full title is obscured by some 'space dust': it's 'How to Cook For Humans.' Lisa isn't convinced and removes some more lingering space dust on the cover: it's 'How to Cook Forty Humans'. Kang finally reveals the full title: 'How to Cook for Forty Humans'. The aliens are dismayed at humanity's suspicious nature and return them to Earth, saying they've forfeited the paradise the aliens were offering them. The episode also jokes that the reason the Aliens speak English is that by an amazing coincidence, English and Rigelian are identical. |
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Metal Gear: In the original Metal Gear Solid, Psycho Mantis's Interface Screw works in both English and Japanese, but only because Japanese borrows the word "video" from English. In English, it relies on the similarity between VIDEO and HIDEO; in Japanese, it's ビデオ and ヒデオ.note Literally "bideo" and "hideo". Notice that the Japanese works even better than the English; the change is really subtle! There's a moment in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots where Snake reads out the slogan of the French PMC Pieuvre Armament, "Les tentacules de la pieuvre pour votre guerre!" ("The tentacles of the octopus for your war!"), and personally translates it as "Arms of the octopus. Arms for your war!". Snake's translation relies on wordplay regarding the word "arms" as meaning both limbs and weapons, which obviously didn't exist in the original French slogan. Reversing Snake's translation would turn it into "Les bras de la pieuvre. Les armes pour votre guerre.", where "Bras" and "Armes" don't work together as a pun. |
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Lampshaded in Schlock Mercenary. After a character makes a pun ("'Mercy' and 'Mercenary' may sound similar, but I assure you it's just a misleading coincidence"), the narration box notes that "Oddly enough, this joke works in Galstandard West as well as in English." | |
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Stargate-verse: The movie Stargate had Daniel Jackson correct a translation of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, changing "door to heavens" to "Stargate". This is possibly because "Stargate" sounds cooler than "door to heavens". However, in the SG-1 episode "Moebius", Jackson travels back in time and helps plan the uprising that would lead to the Stargate being buried, along with the coverstone with the hieroglyphs (which he likely helped write) which he would 6000 years later translate as being Stargate. So it's not surprising he can translate it as he wrote it. Lightly spoofed and subverted in Stargate SG-1, where Dr. Jackson (now the team linguist) once translated something as "the place of our legacy" but expressed some doubt by adding that it could also mean "a piece of our leg, but the first seems to make more sense." This was done again when SG-1 was searching for the Lost City. Jonas Quinn thought that it should be translated as the City of the Lost because the Ancients couldn't possibly lose one of their own cities and of course, Jack O'Neill took this to mean the City of the Dead. They came full circle when Dr. Jackson returned to the team and revealed that the city had been built lost and was therefore the Lost City. |
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There's a moment in Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots where Snake reads out the slogan of the French PMC Pieuvre Armament, "Les tentacules de la pieuvre pour votre guerre!" ("The tentacles of the octopus for your war!"), and personally translates it as "Arms of the octopus. Arms for your war!". Snake's translation relies on wordplay regarding the word "arms" as meaning both limbs and weapons, which obviously didn't exist in the original French slogan. Reversing Snake's translation would turn it into "Les bras de la pieuvre. Les armes pour votre guerre.", where "Bras" and "Armes" don't work together as a pun. | |
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Discussed in the Stargate SG-1 episode "The Pegasus Project", a crossover with Stargate Atlantis. After Morgan Le Fay in her hologram-guise gives Daniel and Vala the exact names they've been looking for, Daniel immediately gets suspicious. Languages change over time, so how could the Atlantis database know exactly what they were looking for. It's a big hint they're not actually talking to a hologram. | |
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Call of Cthulhu RPG makes a deliberate point of this: with each successive translation of the Necronomicon (or any other Tome of Eldritch Lore ), its in-game usefulness as a source of knowledge/power/danger decreases. | |
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Subversion on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Dax translates a particular line of ancient Bajoran glyphs as meaning that the people will either "suffer horribly" or "eat fruit", depending on context. | |
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Averted in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS with Carim's prophecies. They foretell the future exactly as it will come to pass...except you can't pick what is predicted and it comes out in ancient Belkian poetic verse, which makes it very difficult to translate properly. The accuracy is therefore reduced to the level of 'educated guess' or 'accurate horoscope.' And, in fact, they misinterpret the main prophecy to mean doomsday for the TSAB when in reality it says that they win. | |
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Into The Veesha-verse: Subverted and played for laughs. "My Treasure" has Vee try to translate German word-for-word, but she quickly realizes that the syntax doesn't quite add up. | |
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Generally played straight in Speaker for the Dead, in which translations between English and Portuguese and the alien languages of the pequeninos tend to be incredibly precise and elegant. Possibly justified as the translator is usually a "piggy," and they are canonically better than humans at learning new languages. There is one important aversion: at one point, Ender asks a male piggy to translate a statement in which he commands a female piggy and refers to her asking him for a favor. It is explained to him that the syntax to express this does not exist in their language; a female can command a male and a male can petition a female, but never the other way around. | |
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Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Why does V'ger call itself that? Because that's how you pronounce "V[illegible]GER", of course. But how would the aliens that found it know that? | |
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Our Miss Brooks: In "Monsieur Leblanche" (a Sound-to-Screen Adaptation of Mr. Leblanche Needs $50), Mr. Leblanche writes a letter to Miss Brooks asking to borrow $50. Harriet Conklin, who is fluent in French, ultimately translates the letter after Walter Denton's ridiculous and altogether erroneous attempt. Harriet smoothly translates the French in perfect English, somehow doing it word-for-word. Walter had told Miss Brooks that Mr. Leblanche was asking her on a date, Harriet discovers that Leblanche was asking to borrow $50 to buy a car. | |
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This is not the case in the original visual novel, as it gives the sort of translation you'd expect from Babel Fish. They don't get decent translations until Kurisu joins the group, as she can actually speak both English and Japanese. | |
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An in-universe trope subversion showing an on-the-spot translation occurs in The Lord of the Rings: Gandalf translates the (punctuation-less) inscription on the door to Moria (Pedo mellon a minno) as "Speak, friend, and enter." which, while 1:1 correct, should have rather been rendered as "Say 'friend' and enter." To preserve the meaning: Saying aloud the Sindarin word 'friend' (mellon) is the password to open the door. | |
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In Yu-Gi-Oh!: Capsule Monsters, the clues to solving the game Grandpa Muto, Yugi, and their friends are trapped in are written in hieroglyphics. Yet when Grandpa and the Pharaoh read them out loud in English, they rhyme nicely, with proper rhythm and rhyme. | |
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A related instance occurred in the pilot episode of Lost. Shannon translates the French distress call as "It killed them all." However, the actual pronoun used is "il," which would more commonly be translated as "he", French does not have a separate pronoun for inanimate objects. Hence, she more likely would translate the message as "He killed them all." However, seeing as some thing had just killed the pilot, the line needed to be translated with "it." | |
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Averted in the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Bread and Circuses" with an example similar to the Zeitgeist one below where the Enterprise runs into a planet of space Romans where the rebels worship the sun. It is revealed at the end that it's actually the "son of God". The writers intentionally established early on in the episode that the natives were speaking English, precisely so they wouldn't need to deal with this issue. | |
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Possibly subverted in A Song of Ice and Fire where everyone is concerned about the prophesied "Prince that was Promised." However, the prophesy in question was written in ancient Valyrian and one character points out a quirk of the Valyrian language: grammatical gender in High Valyrian has no correspondence at all to human gender, so the Promised One might not be a prince but a princess. Whether the character's theory is correct or not remains to be seen, but the evidence seems to be in favor so far. | |
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In the original Metal Gear Solid, Psycho Mantis's Interface Screw works in both English and Japanese, but only because Japanese borrows the word "video" from English. In English, it relies on the similarity between VIDEO and HIDEO; in Japanese, it's ビデオ and ヒデオ.note Literally "bideo" and "hideo". Notice that the Japanese works even better than the English; the change is really subtle! | |
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The movie Stargate had Daniel Jackson correct a translation of Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, changing "door to heavens" to "Stargate". This is possibly because "Stargate" sounds cooler than "door to heavens". However, in the SG-1 episode "Moebius", Jackson travels back in time and helps plan the uprising that would lead to the Stargate being buried, along with the coverstone with the hieroglyphs (which he likely helped write) which he would 6000 years later translate as being Stargate. So it's not surprising he can translate it as he wrote it. | |
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The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley contains an aversion. The remnants of humanity have been receiving technical knowledge from a mysterious extra-solar source, and finally a message arrives which seems to be demanding payment. We see a "probability weighted" translation. It begins FOR (A PERIOD OF TIME: CONJECTURE: 400 EARTH YEARS?) DATA HAS BEEN SENT. NEW SUBSCRIBERS (22%) ARE GIVEN A (UNTRANSLATABLE) TO ADJUST and ends SEVERE PENALTIES, SEVERE PENALTIES (97%) | |
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Subverted in the Doctor Who episode "A Good Man Goes to War". Melody Pond, the daughter of Amy and Rory? After translation through the language of the Gamma Forest, her name translates to River Song. Also given a nice EXPLANATION, as well. The only water in the Gamma Forest is the river, so "River" is their language's closest translation of "Pond". Also averted with the Arc Words of the season: "Silence Will Fall" is said by various characters in rather ominous circumstances, but in the last episode of the season it is revealed that "Silence Must Fall" would be a better translation, and that the full phrase would be "Silence must fall when the question is asked". This discovery changes the role of the season's primary antagonists from apparent Omnicidal Maniacs who want to kill the Doctor as part of their plan to Well Intentioned Extremists who are trying to kill the Doctor before he is asked "the question", which would make the Time Lords return and resume fighting the Last Great Time War. Why must silence fall? Because where the Doctor is asked "the question" is a truth field that prevents anyone from lying. Therefore, the only options are to answer truthfully (bad) or not speak. Averted in "The Christmas Invasion." A hasty, computer-assisted translation of a newly-encountered alien language uses exceedingly simple vocabulary and syntax and often renders a single concept using two or three near-synonyms when it's unclear which one is closest to the intended meaning. When the setting's Translator Microbes kick back in and the viewpoint characters (and audience) start hearing English coming out of the aliens' mouths, they sound just like any other aliens on the show. |
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Averted in Gargantia on the Verdurous Planet, in particular with "arigatou/thank you" which has no equivalent in Ledo's language and requires a lengthy explanation. They also don't have a word for "meat," since they presumably only eat synthetic food, so his translator can only describe fish and chicken as "corpses." | |
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Atlantis: The Lost Empire plays with this. The reason why Atlantis was never found was a single error: instead of �rland, it was supposed to be �sland. Which, conveniently are Ireland and Iceland in English (for added fun, they are almost the same in most languages the film was dubbed in, keeping the joke). | |
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The novel Trixie Belden and the Mystery of the Blinking Eye features a prophecy written by a Spanish-speaking woman, in Spanish, which is then translated into English. Amazingly, it was written so precisely that it rhymes perfectly in English, and although it becomes a plot point that they aren't sure whether a line ought to read "big headed man" (as in, a man with a physically large head) or "big-headed man" (as in, a man who thinks a lot of himself), this is possibly an artifact of the English translation, and no such confusion may have existed in the original wording. The Spanish word cabezón could have both meanings. | |
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This is averted in Eragon. Brom translates a poem from the Ancient Language (Elvish) for Eragon, which sounds pretty but has no real rhyme or meter, and Brom says himself that he can't translate it perfectly. And therefore makes perfect sense. Again averted in the sequel, Eldest, when Eragon composes a poem in the Ancient Language. The reader is shown a translation of it, and it doesn't rhyme either. This allows the author to provide incredibly beautiful, classic poems without having to write overwhelmingly moving poems from scratch. | |
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Subversion: In Buffy the Arc Words in Season 7 are "From beneath you, it devours". Andrew and Jonathan reveal in "Conversations With Dead People" that, while in Mexico, they've had dreams with the refrain "Desde abajo te devora." Andrew translates the phrase as "It eats you, starting with your bottom". The literal translation is "From below, it devours you", but this particular phrase probably would translate fairly closely to Spanish and back. Andrew provides his own lampshade a little earlier in the scene when he complains that Klingon was easier to learn than Spanish because the former "had much clearer rules on transitive and intransitive verbs." |
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Subverted in Event Horizon. The (somewhat garbled) distress signal sent by Event Horizon contains the Latin phrase liberate me ("save me"). It was later realized that the message was actually liberate tutame ex inferis ("save yourself from Hell"). Amusingly enough, the translation was still a little off. It would more accurately mean "free me/yourself." | |
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The Star Trek: Voyager episode "Riddles" features Neelix telling a joke to Tuvok. The riddle is, essentially, "Some guy is stranded on a desert island with only a calendar, isn't rescued for six months, but survives. How did he do it?" Tuvok is rather unimpressed at the answer of, "He ate the dates." Later, Tuvok proposes that "He ate the Sundays (sundaes)" could be an alternate answer. These are, mind you, alien characters and neither one has any incentive to learn English since they live with universal translators. Neelix in particular was only exposed to humans (and therefore English) seven years ago. The implication is either that both these characters took the time to learn English for some reason, and the joke wasn't Lost in Translation, or dates/sundaes are both food- and time-related words in three different languages. Tuvok, at least, has the excuse of being readily familiar with the Earth dating system. It's not unreasonable to expect Vulcans to have studied English, either, as it is occasionally stated to actually be the official language of the Federation, not just a Translation Convention. As for Neelix, he could have simply looked the joke up, and he is sometimes portrayed as quite enthusiastic about studying the cultures of his new friends. (E.g. preparing Klingon food for a holiday B'Elanna doesn't even bother to celebrate.) |
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In the first Artemis Fowl book, Artemis is able to write a computer program that is able to decipher a written language that predates Egyptian hieroglyphics, and then translate it into English in perfect meter and rhyme. All this without actually having any knowledge of other languages himself. Sure he's supposed to be a genius, but... Then again, Gnommish is less an ancient language and more a fancy English cipher. Holly Short works for the Lower Elements Police Reconnaissance, or LEPrecon. Like "leprechaun", see? Which means the English translation of a Gnomish abbreviation happens to sound just like a Gaelic word. |
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The Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "Darmok" gleefully deconstructed this trope. When trying to communicate with an alien race, the universal translator didn't work on their language because their speech patterns were vastly different. Their language was based on metaphor, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is said repeatedly to the Enterprise crew, but it isn't until much later that they learn Darmok and Jalad were mythological heroes who became friends at the place Tanagra, slaying a legendary beast. So when they say "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" it is a term for a friendship formed while battling a common foe. Another example is the phrase "Sokath. His eyes uncovered!" which is taken to mean "He understands!" Some linguistics professors like to show this episode to their students as an example of how understanding a language requires understanding the culture that created it. |
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